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GlobalData Tracks the Evolution of the Enterprise IoT Platform Market

Kathryn Weldon – Research Director, Business Network and IT Services – Americas

Summary Bullets:

• Over the past year, changes in the market have led to changes in GlobalData’s rankings of the top ten enterprise IoT platforms.

• While SAP leads the pack, IBM, PTC and AWS are close behind; each vendor has added capabilities. Analytics, edge processing, go-to-market plans, and integration with other elements of vendors’ portfolios contributed to higher scores.

GlobalData has just completed its analysis and rankings of the top vendors in the Enterprise IoT platform market. For the complete report see here – vendors included are Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Google, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, PTC, and SAP.

Over the last 12 months, the enterprise IoT platform market has evolved; new capabilities were added by vendors, new partnerships established, changes were made in go-to-market strategies, and some vendors have largely dropped out of contention. The most significant example of such a change in direction was GE’s decision to sell off its Digital division last year, which included its Predix IoT platform, in spite of the fact that it was considered a strong contender in the manufacturing sector. For this reason we have eliminated GE from our analysis.

Most of the ten vendors that GlobalData analyzes in this report have been busily adding to their portfolios in 2019. For example, Amazon has risen in our rankings due in part to capabilities announced in late 2018 that significantly improved its visualization and analytics tools and edge processing abilities. IBM remains a very strong provider that has been providing IoT integration with its own considerable software offerings (e.g. Maximo, Cognos, and TRIRIGA) for asset monitoring and business intelligence. Cisco has enhanced its security capabilities with its acquisition of Sentryo. Microsoft and SAP have improved their positions by partnering with each other to better serve enterprise customers with integrated platforms, business data, and app development skill sets. PTC continues its excellence in the industrial sector, is seeing positive movement from its Rockwell Automation investment and partnership, and is beginning to see good traction with its leading-edge AR solutions. HPE continues to do well in growth markets such as India and Japan. Huawei has been developing its ecosystem and productizing a wide range of vertical solutions.

Of these vendors, we find SAP to be the overall market leader, with IBM a close second, and Amazon and PTC very close behind them, with an overall rating for each of the latter three vendors of ‘very strong’. Across our key buying criteria, these vendors demonstrated a clear mastery of major requirements, particularly data collection, manipulation, management, and analysis, all capabilities that allow IoT to be truly transformative. We also note that leaders vary by the segment in the market where they focus: SAP, IBM, and to a lesser extent, Oracle, lead in the enterprise software segment; Amazon and Microsoft continue to lead the hyperscale cloud services segment, and Cisco is the leader in the infrastructure segment with HPE and Huawei close behind.

Market requirements have also changed in the past year. As shown below, the importance of edge computing, more sophisticated analytics, the ability of vendors to integrate IoT with other elements in their portfolios, and go-to-market partnerships have become important differentiators.

• Focus on the Edge: Edge computing is becoming an important part of enterprise architectures to optimize processing and reduce latency for time-critical analysis of IoT data sets; platform vendors have added capabilities to help customers leverage the edge as they build applications. For example, both AWS and PTC have enhanced their edge capabilities over the past year.

• Internal Product Integration: IoT platform vendors can leverage internal cross-sales opportunities and buoy up the IoT groups within their company as IoT opportunities grow by integrating solutions that serve complementary markets or customers. Examples of companies that have recently advanced in this strategy include SAP, IBM, and PTC.

• Analysis and Reporting: IoT platforms must include a multi-faceted analytics and reporting package that provides insight across both operational and business domains. These capabilities must go beyond simple dash-boarding and data discovery to natively incorporate IoT-specific information. They must incorporate advanced, predictive modeling facilities utilizing AI technologies such as ML. AWS and Google have both added a number of analytic enhancements over the past year.

• Go-to-Market Expansion: A number of vendors have announced partnerships and technical integrations that enlarge their product scope and potential market opportunity. New IoT “pairings” include: Microsoft and SAP; Google and Aeris; IBM and Cisco; and PTC and Microsoft.

No matter which market segment is its primary focus, every vendor evaluated in this report is fully capable of successfully supporting an entire solution IoT stack, each with an emphasis appropriate to its market and customer base. Customers seeking an emphasis on device management, for example, will seek out an infrastructure vendor such as Cisco, HPE, or Huawei. Conversely, customers in need of an IoT solution tied closely with line of business software, will favor SAP, IBM, or Oracle. And customers seeking to partner with a public cloud service provider will favor Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. It’s not a question of finding an outright “best” IoT partner, but rather finding the best match for the needs at hand.